Mind the Gap

You might recall what I was saying in my post on Sunday about women of colour within predominantly white feminist groups often being expected to speak out against their culture before being allowed to speak for themselves. I’d now like to share this article by Dr Anene Ejikem, assistant professor of history at Trinity University, published at Pambazuka News (via La Chola ). In particular, these extracts stood out for me:

“In 1929 women in southeast Nigeria mounted a war against the forces of British colonial rule. The women targeted all the symbols of the new political order - the offices and homes of colonial officialdom, as well as its representatives. The “disturbances” and the demands made by the women at the Commission of Inquiry set up by the colonial government to investigate surprised the British. The women who testified before the Commission consistently demanded that women be represented in the new institutions which had been set up by the colonial government. More than 50 women lost their lives, but colonial authorities failed to appreciate the extent to which women felt aggrieved by colonial policies which rendered them invisible. Although the women organized and carried out this rebellion, it did not stop colonial authorities and missionaries from continuing to insist that African women were “no better than cattle and sheep” and completely lacking in agency.

“The assumption that African women lack agency continues to be the prevailing view.”

Almost eighty years later, the assumption that African women lack agency continues to be the prevailing view about them. This impression is so often at variance with what I see, for example, when I am at home in Nigeria where, every day, I meet women who struggle to feed their families and to send their children to school, daily making decisions that help sustain their families.”

“Researchers and development workers appear eager always to point to “Tradition” as the reason for African women’s lack of agency. Take, for example, the statement issued by a recent international summit convened to address the economic crisis in Africa.

“In Africa, the gender gap is even wider and the situation is more complex due to the cultural and traditional context which is anchored in beliefs, norms and practices which breed discrimination and feminised poverty. There is growing evidence that the number of women in Africa living in poverty has increased disproportionately to that of men.”…

…There is no doubt that there are many traditions in Africa that hamper women’s ability to lead economically prosperous lives, but to point to “Tradition” as the root cause of African women’s poverty obscures reality more than it clarifies it. First of all, there is no single “Tradition” which exists all over Africa. Secondly, what is considered “traditional” in African communities is often of relatively recent vintage and was colonially-generated. Foreign aid workers and African men are too eager to point to “Tradition” when excluding women from development projects. For example, in Kenya, local men - and “development officers” - are often quick to insist that it is “untraditional” for women to own land. The truth is, of course, that individual land ownership is not “traditional” for anyone in Kenya; individual land ownership was usefully introduced by British colonial authorities keen to claim the most fertile lands for Europeans.1 “What is considered “traditional” in African communities is often of relatively recent vintage and was colonially-generated. Foreign aid workers and African men are too eager to point to “Tradition” when excluding women from development projects.”

The idea conveyed when “Tradition” is blamed for African women’s economic predicament is that African beliefs and practices constitute part of an ancient, unchanging way of life, not easily amenable to change. The reality too often is that aid and development workers assume that the existence of “Tradition” makes African women incapable of acting as authors of their own lives. Numerous studies now exist which point to the unwillingness or incapacity of development workers to engage African women in dialogue as a fundamental obstacle to the success of many so-called aid programs.2 Fundamental to any task of understanding Africa is the acknowledgment of the continent’s diversity. Not even within a single country do sweeping generalizations hold. An absolute priority to ending poverty in Africa is to listen to the experiences and wisdom of poor African women.”

“Who should speak for African women? Too often it is either African men or Western women. We need to hear more from the African women themselves whose lives we all claim we wish to improve. Also, we must incorporate the important critiques by African women scholars of the flawed categories that continue to be used to describe African women’s lives and African societies. Scholars such as Felicia Ekejiuba, Achola Pala, Nkiru Nzegwu and Oyeronke Oyewumi have written about how the categories used to describe African women’s lives often are derived from very different realities in other parts of the world and end up doing more violence to the women whose lives the activists/scholars claim they seek to ameliorate.”

Of course, when it comes to blaming “tradition”, it would seem pretty obvious that an assumption that tends to be applied across the board to all of Africa, Asia and South America, would be wrong, not to mention pretty lazy. It’s also the kind of thinking that should be triggering a few alarm bells, and reminiscences about our own history, as did this comment I saw recently from a white, middle-class, left-of-centre, often outspokenly anti-racist feminist:

“But sadly rather than be seen supporting women speaking out against the culture they come from the government would rather try and bully the “quiet” ones into speaking out in favour of the culture that is oppressing them.”

Actually, the author of this statement would say that she was arguing against religion, not culture and even less race. But there are obvious problems in separating these things, though that’s a whole other post. But the result of this kind of thinking is that what amounts to the vast majority of women on the planet are never allowed to speak for themselves. Why? Well, I mentioned the role of colonialism in my post yesterday, as a reason why so many traditions in former colonies seem oppressive to women. It would be good for us to remember that one of the excuses for colonialism, that still gets used today, is that Western Imperial powers were somehow improving the lives of the people in the countries they were colonising. Isn’t it alarming how close that attitude is to that of white feminist groups who exclude women of colour unless they’re prepared to give up their entire culture and heritage?

Of course, we don’t have capital, land, or cheap labour to gain from it, in fact we’re generally against that sort of thing. But we do have other things to gain: credibility, a warm fuzzy glow of being right, and above all, safety in our assumptions, so we can keep on enjoying a degree of privilege, which is quite similar to what colonialists had to gain from the same kind of thinking. In fact, a lot of white feminists’ entire identity is built entirely on the assumption that they have always been a bit different, a bit smarter than all the others, or that they were suddenly enlightened when they became feminists. Challenging that assumption is often the fastest way to be labelled an elitist, funnily enough. Burst that bubble, and that entire illusion is shattered, and you have to confront the actual consequences of thinking in this way. Only the bubble is often more like a cocoon or a carapace, we tend to take it with us wherever we go. Take, for instance, this extract from an F-Word post this month. I’m quite sure that it was well-meaning, and the author of it is trying to be self-deprecating rather than offensive. But it still seems slightly off:

“I have spent the last six weeks in Central America eating termites, climbing active volcanoes, drinking “local” alcohol purchased in old Pepsi bottles from street vendors of questionable personal hygiene and other such dangerous activities after which I am probably lucky to have escaped only with a broken toe and an unexplained rash. However, before I departed on my big dangerous adventure, I did promise our fearless editor that I would return with as much feminist-type stuff to write about as possible.

I had of course had fantastic visions of securing killer interviews with downtrodden indigenous women who had undergone forced sterilisation, teenagers who didn’t know what a condom was, people whose relatives had died from back-street abortions and stuffy politicians who thought that women should all go back to the cocina and make them some gallopinto.”

My problem with it, aside from the remark about the street vendors’ hygiene, is the feeling that the author was expecting to enter a museum of poverty, and to find a lot of her assumptions confirmed. I trust that had she secured any of those interviews and her assumptions hadn’t been confirmed, she would have published them anyway. But it still bothers me a great deal that they mostly revolved around the people in the country she was visiting being staggeringly ignorant. What’s also bothering me is the flippant, slightly amused tone in which it is delivered. Even if it is self-deprecating, that’s just the problem: this isn’t about poverty in Latin America, it’s about a middle-class English girl’s situation as someone visiting a third-world country. Those people and their putative horrible lives are nothing but props for her experience, which is probably also why her slightly amused tone carries over to her description of them in a slightly jarring way. They don’t get to speak for themselves at all. In fact, they’re not mentioned, they’ve been supplanted by the fictional people she might have spoken to.

And I don’t blame her for choosing not to speak to people. It was her holiday, and I can understand not feeling confident enough to do so. But there are so many other examples of people being denied the ability to speak, simply because the main forums for expression are dominated by white middle-class people, who end up speaking for everyone else. Plenty of white feminists, myself included, get outraged when someone claims to speak on behalf of all feminists, let alone all women in the UK. That’s why we get frustrated about being mis-represented in the press: someone with a louder voice is trying to tell us what we think, what we do, what we look like, what we eat and drink, and how we dress, which ends up being damaging to all that hard work we’re trying to get done. Yet we still do exactly the same thing to the vast majority of women worldwide.

In fact, isn’t it a little striking that, due to our privilege, we’re in a position to allow people to speak for themselves or not? Shouldn’t we be questioning the fact that, by and large, the most white, middle-class of us get to define what feminism is, and what’s good for all women worldwide?

It’s not enough for us to magnanimously acknowledge that “oppressed women” should be allowed a voice too. Although, to be honest, even if there was a monolithic “tradition” that applied across the board to whole continents and women in these dark dragon-infested places were being held at gunpoint by men, it would still seem self-evident that the women should be allowed a voice.

Maybe it’s time to start thinking of our privilege a little differently. It’s not enough to just apologise for it. After all, privilege isn’t just something innocuous, like blue eyes or a birthmark, even though it’s often inherited with even more certainty. Privilege is active, dynamic, and even destructive. It’s not enough for us to accept that women who don’t have our privilege can be part of the solution. We also need to examine in what ways our privilege actually makes us part of the problem.

You’ll also notice that, for the purposes of this post, I’ve pulled out the parts of Dr Ejikem’s article that apply to white feminists, ignoring the parts about the realities of life in Africa. So go back and read the rest of the article, now.